A user may utilize multiple computing devices to view and maintain e-mail and personal information items, such as contacts, calendar items, tasks, notes, and journal entries. Such devices include personal computers (“PC”), digital cellular phones, personal digital assistants (“PDA”), game consoles, set-top boxes, etc. Each of these devices may have a different software program, known as a personal information manager (“PIM”), for the management of e-mail and personal information items.
Many of the PIM programs on the user's devices may support the “roaming” of e-mail across multiple devices. In other words, the user's e-mail may be stored in a standard format in a central location and replicated to the PIM on multiple of the user's devices. In this way, changes made to the e-mail on one device, such as deleting a message or marking a message as read, may be replicated to the user's other devices. Traditionally, however, a PIM maintains other personal information items for the user in a local storage, often using native formats specific to the individual PIM program. Changes made to a personal information item, such as a contact or task, on one device may be isolated to that device and unavailable to the user's other devices. While some server programs may exist that allow roaming of personal information items across devices, these servers often use proprietary protocols and may be limited to access by a specific client application.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.